I’m always annoyed by writers who say that they compose every sentence as if it were the last they would ever write. That accords too much importance to writing, or too little to life. What I didn’t know is that the attack was going to make me relive each moment as if it were the last line: forgetting as little as possible becomes essential when you suddenly become estranged from what you’ve experienced, when you feel yourself leaking away on all sides. I’ve therefore come to think more or less the same about the people who annoyed me, even if for different reasons and under different circumstances: you have to notice the smallest details of what you experience, the tiniest of tiny things, as if you were going to die in the following minute or change planets—the next one being no more hospitable than the one you’ve left. That would be useful for the journey, and as a memory for survivors; still more useful for ghosts, those who, not being dead any more than the others, went somewhere so far away that they are no longer completely at home here in the world where people continue to go about their occupations as if the repetition of days and acts had a linear, established meaning, as if theater were a mission. The ghosts would read their notes, watch the others live, rub against their memories and their lives. They would compare all that in the light of the spark produced, and warming themselves at it, might recall that they were once alive.
For the future victim, a little thought that comes to mind in the toilet would be more important than a declaration of war, a meeting at work, or a minister’s resignation. Writing would suspend time, whose framework it restitutes, and then, once the page was written, the play would continue until it was suddenly interrupted. It would not be exactly Les Choses de la vie (The Things of Life), Claude Sautet’s film in which the hero, the victim of an automobile accident, reviews the most important moments in his life just when he is about to lose it. No, it would not be a question of noting the essential things, the main stages; that is the perspective of someone who is alive and healthy. At first, there would be only the very little things, those of the last minutes, the tiny ashes of the condemned man’s last cigarette, the man who does not yet know that sentence has been passed and that the executioner is on the way, with everything he owns in the trunk of a stolen car.
Obviously, I didn’t do all that. I didn’t take these notes on the hours that preceded the appearance of the killers, since it was a morning like any other, but I have the feeling that someone else did it for me, a practical joker who decamped and whom I am trying, by writing, to catch.
I slept alone at home, between sheets it was time to change. I am fanatical about fresh sheets, they enchant my sleeping and my waking, and one of the things that make me regret leaving the hospital is that they were changed every morning. So I woke up in a bad mood, wearied by an indefinable dissatisfaction. This indefinable something was no doubt exaggerated by the weather, gray and cold and lightless. Watching, after I returned from the theater, an interview with Michel Houellebecq on France 2 regarding his new novel, Soumission (Submission), didn’t help. One should never watch television before going to bed, I said to myself, it weighs on one’s consciousness and stomach as much as dirty sheets do. I remember that. The impression of having been trapped by a lazy, late-evening curiosity, my own, that ends the day with a program on current events rather than with silence, and if possible, a flourish.
I had published a review of Houellebecq’s book in Libération the preceding weekend, and for the occasion, the newspaper had organized a discussion that was to be announced on the front page. I will return to this subject, dear reader, and I fear at some length, since the figure of Houellebecq is now mixed with the memory of the attack: for others, it is a coincidence, comical or tragic; for those who survived the killers, it is an intimate experience. Soumission was in fact published on January 7.
In the world of blowhards with instantaneous opinions, everyone, or almost, was necessarily going to express his view, since Houellebecq was involved. In the program I watched before going to sleep, he looked like an old, not very nice mutt, abandoned near a fast-food restaurant at a highway rest stop, which made me like him, but he also looked like Droopy and Gai-Luron, the dog imagined by Gotlib, which made me find him funny. “I feel a kind a heavy torpor descending on me.” The torpor arising from any foreseeable interview and the storm that it was going to provoke.
People would talk all the more because this time Houellebecq was evoking a particularly explosive fantasy, that of a repetition of the medieval Battle of Poitiers: the fear of Muslims and of Islamists coming to power in France. I laughed a lot as I read Soumission, with its scenes, its portraits, its coyly downplayed provocations, its fin de siècle melancholy about the end of civilization. Seeing an important Islamist minister put in the apartment of the former head of the NRF publishing house, Jean Paulhan, that implacable Jesuit grammarian, gave me special pleasure—even if it was a pleasure for the happy few. If the novel deserved to exist, the reason was that it enabled the reader to imagine anything, anyone, in any situation whatever, as if it were about this world and one’s own life.
I had discovered Houellebecq back when he was writing columns full of malevolent wit in a fashionable cultural weekly, columns that I almost never missed. There are very few good columnists: some limit themselves to important topics of the moment and the ambient morality; others try to show how clever they are by opposing currently accepted ideas. The former are slaves to society, the latter slaves to their mask. In both cases they seek to create a distinctive style and quickly fade. Houellebecq’s pessimism and laconic sarcasm had a naturalness that did not fade. At that time, I imagine that he was thought to be left-wing. It’s true that people still didn’t know that the left was continuing to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Later on, I enjoyed reading his books. When I had turned the last page, a certain threat and a taste of plaster hung in the air like a cloud of dust over a field of ruins, but inside the cloud there was a smile. His misogyny, his reactionary irony, all that didn’t bother me: a novel is not a place of virtue. At first, I found Houellebecq sometimes lazy about facts, never about form, until I understood, a little tardily, that the stereotype (touristic, sexual, artistic) was one of his raw materials, and for him it was essential not to avoid it. I don’t know whether, as has been said, he was the great novelist, or one of the great novelists of the Western middle classes. I don’t do sociology when I’m reading a novel and not much more after I’ve finished it. I believe wholly and exclusively in the destinies and natures of the characters, just as I did when I was ten years old. I followed Houellebecq’s characters as I would have followed losers who, in a supermarket, fill their baskets with sale items and transform their loot, once they are out in the parking lot, into coldly prophetic signs of human poverty.
Like every time I’d written about a book, I’d been determined to avoid reading or listening to anything about Soumission, whose sole effect would have been to cause me a slight nausea: sitting through the TV program after Shakespeare had been enough for me. I wanted to avoid it even more because I was supposed to talk with the writer the following Saturday. Having written the review and organized the discussion that Libération was devoting to it, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what questions I was going to ask him. I’d have to talk about something else, about everything and anything but Soumission. He wasn’t going to tell me what I should have read and I wasn’t going to tell him what I thought I’d read. Most interviews with writers or artists are useless. They merely paraphrase the work that has elicited them. They feed advertising and social buzz. As an interviewer, I contribute to this buzz. By nature, it disgusted me. I saw in it an assault on privacy, on the autonomy of readers, who were not sufficiently compensated by the information they were given. What they needed was silence, and what I needed was to move on to something else, but I already knew, like everyone who had read it before it was published, that Soumission would not be granted any silence. Maybe that was what it was to be a famous moralist: a man who writes books that are judged only as proofs of his genius or of his guilt. This was not a new phenomenon. With Houellebecq it took on proportions disturbing enough to justify his pessimism and his success.
At the moment, on that morning of January 7, the prospect of this national debate and of this interview in particular simply put me in a bad mood. I’d gone to bed under the sign of Shakespeare and Houellebecq. I got up under the sign of Houellebecq and I was going to have to write about Shakespeare. Strange day.
It was about eight o’clock. I watched the gnats flying around the curtains in the living room—too many books, too much disorder, too many old tissues. I went downstairs to get the copy of Libération from my mailbox. When I returned to my apartment, I killed a few gnats with it. They made little stains like ink spots on the ceiling. Killing was a way of warming up. Next, I flipped through the paper as I drank my coffee, then I opened my computer to read the e-mail that had come in overnight.
From New York, the friend and professor to whom I owed the position at Princeton congratulated me. He took advantage of the opportunity to speak to me about the article on Houellebecq. I wrote a brief reply. Another e-mail, this one from Clément, the director of Twelfth Night. He was sending me his translation of the play, adding:
So here’s the text of Twelfth Night as you heard it last night—the exact night of the play. Twelfth Night is the twelfth night after Christmas: January 6.
I read the beginning of the translation, at the same time comparing it with those that were in my library. I felt incapable of judging their respective values. But why would I have wanted to?
I bought a plane ticket for New York, where I was to supposed meet Gabriela a week later. Then I closed my computer and, as I did every morning, looked at my old apartment—or, more precisely, my landlord’s apartment—wondering where to begin.
I’d been living there for twenty-five years. The carpet was worn out; the wallpaper had yellowed. Books, newspapers, records, notebooks, objects, and trinkets had invaded everything. Twenty-five years of life! And nothing, probably, that would deserve to survive. Unless it was a rather fine sleigh bed that was in poor condition. It had been given to me, the year I moved in, by a friend of my parents. Her husband used to stretch out on it to read, write, or take a nap. He was an excellent journalist; alcohol had both kept him going and destroyed him. His personality changed when he drank. When I started out, I worked for the same newspaper he did. He liked trains, and one day he threw himself under one of them at the Villeneuve-Saint-Georges switchyard. He was stocky, with metallic gray-blue eyes squeezed into a red, square face. He spoke little and articulated still less. Although he wasn’t sober, his writing was. For several of us, I think, his death marked the end of an era. A professional era that I hardly knew except, precisely, through people like him. It was going out, like the tide, when I had just dipped my toes in the water for the first time. The day after the event, his wife suggested that I come get the sleigh bed. She no longer wanted it, but she preferred that it not end up with someone she didn’t know. When I lie down on it to read or take a nap in my turn, it seems to me that the dead man’s spirit is watching over me.
The big carpet that occupied the living room came from Iraq. I had bought it in Baghdad, in a souk, in January 1991, two days before the first American bombardment. I was one of three journalists there, as I recall, and we drank tea, talking and joking with the old merchant in an atmosphere that seemed unreal to us, since war was coming. Most of the Westerners had left town during the preceding days. The embassies were closed. Nothing is more flattering or more exciting than finding oneself in a place that others have deserted, in the eye that waiting hollows out at the center of the hurricane. We were young, uneasy, and hungry. History seemed to be our adventure and our property. We had the enthusiasm and the weakness of special envoys, those privileged adventurers: when they die on assignment, their obituaries are all alike, praising the courage that their readers lack.
The carpet was about five meters long and two meters wide. It was long and heavy. The old merchant in Baghdad rolled it up, tied it with twine, and put it in a sack, which I carried away. Twenty-five years later, it had traveled a lot. Holes had gradually destroyed its beauty, its tones of mainly brick-red. It tended to develop folds, like an old man’s skin, and seemed to have digested dirt which, as it was deposited, had taken on a sort of patina. Fabric and dirt were irreversibly bound together by the odor, an odor that was difficult to define, mixing those of morning coffee, vacuum cleaner powders scented with pine needles, shoe soles, spilled liquids, rug shampoos, and Tibetan incense.
Two days after buying the carpet, I took the last plane for Amman with it. That was an error, which the newspaper I was then working for allowed me to commit, the management having decided that I alone could make the decision to stay or not. I was twenty-seven years old. That was already no longer an excuse for making a mistake. I should have remained in Baghdad to cover the bombardments, along with a handful of other individuals who were strange, crazy, self-interested, exalted, such as always exist on this kind of raft, a whole crew that made me feel I was witnessing less an epic than a farce: I had not yet understood to what extent the two are compatible. The hotel where guests and journalists had been brought together by the Iraqi authorities resembled by turns a theater or an asylum: everyone there was a thespian or a neurotic, and it was never boring, either in the rooms or at mealtime.
What all of Saddam Hussein’s last “guests” had in common, in any case more than their support for him, was their hatred of the American government. They came there to testify to the misdeeds of the Evil Empire. The most burlesque of them were the North-American pacifists, who were delighted to play their role as useful idiots and human shields. The journalists present—if I except most of the Arab journalists, who were incapable of taking any distance—had hardly any compassion for these imbeciles who were putting a clown’s grin on the event. They did it by supporting a dictator of the worst kind, a former best friend of the West, whose cellars reeked of beatings and torture. If the crusade pursued by Bush Sr. worried and disgusted almost all of us journalists, it did not prevent us from recognizing the nature of the regime it was directed against. In this case, there were not only idiots but also cynics, and evildoers.
Among the “guests” was Daniel Ortega, who was no longer a Marxist guerilla and not yet a Christian caudillo. With his cowboy boots, he looked like a small-time hooligan from the suburbs of History. I was stupefied: I had believed (half-heartedly, it is true) in the Sandinistas’ struggle. The man I saw reminded me of reporting on the housing projects back in the days when you could still go there casually and without worrying. When I talked with him I wondered if, like some “young people” he was going to ask Saddam for a “meeting room” or subsidies so that he could feel that he existed. Was this really the former leader of Nicaragua? Every time he appeared in the dining room he seemed smaller, more pathetic. It was the man who was shrinking. As he shrank, he shrank History, that old, greedy bawd. He had not yet become a Christian demagogue.
Louis Farrakhan, the black head of the Nation of Islam, was completely chic and scornful. Surrounded by his bodyguards and wearing a black, flawlessly pressed suit, he strode through the room full of white people as if they did not exist. He occasionally spoke to them, because some of them were journalists; but he replied to their questions without looking at them. I felt like a Jew interviewing a Nazi in a world in which the former had not yet been liquidated by the latter. This was the place for that sort of thing: Mein Kampf could be found in the display windows of Baghdad’s bookstores. The Arab world didn’t need the Internet, which did not yet exist, in order to spread conspiracy theories on which it had no monopoly. There were all sorts of them, blue, green, red, all equally idiotic and adding to the general atmosphere of unreality. None of them failed to refer to the Jews.
Jean-Edern Hallier was already no longer a writer that people read: a wretched clown of the same name had replaced him in the minds of most of his former readers. He was accompanied by a little secretary, silent, well-dressed, and carrying a small black briefcase; his name was Omar. Those who had associated with this strange pair in the framework of L’Idiot international, the newspaper that Hallier directed and financed, liked to describe Omar as his henchman. At the dining table, the writer bellowed about his anti-Americanism and his heroic life to anyone who would listen. Omar silently opened the briefcase and handed around photos that corresponded to the heroic episodes his master was recounting. Hallier was there out of a taste for paradox and spectacle, to make people talk about him and to claim the despicable for himself, no matter on which side it was to be found. He made the event his personal possession. When he spoke, he turned his blind eye toward one person, then another, like a cyclops or an animal, drawing attention to the madness of the world by displaying his own. He had even more candor than egocentrism or cunning, which is saying something; and for once, the context had neutralized his malevolence. Perhaps he was right, and all this was just a comedy in which the clown-puppet and the scribe had to be improvised. Hallier was so full of his own image and the traveling circus he carried with him that he had absolutely no fear of what might have happened to him. He was a fairground caricature of Chateaubriand, whom we listened to and looked at, a caricature that transformed the hotel and the city into a pasteboard stage setting. The day of the bombardment, he left with Omar and a driver to visit the ruins of Babylon. Reconstituted with all the local bad taste, they were a fine place from which to witness the Apocalypse that we were promised—while not seeing it. I left before the great little man returned and have never seen him again.
The closer the time set by the ultimatum came, the more the hotel resembled the animal fable it incarnated. Was this the event? Was it really serious? I could have read Malraux or Lawrence out loud without changing anything: my sense of History was limited by what I saw and my respect for those who were making it was close to zero—in this male and mustachioed part of the world, in any case. The French ambassador had left, like most of the others. The man who replaced him had closed the embassy two days before the ultimatum. The journalists were all there. He had been ordered to leave. With a half-smile, he hinted that we should stay. We felt that he did not even understand that we might hesitate. He was firm, reassuring, calm. We emptied the bottles in the cellar and everyone telephoned his family at the embassy’s expense, sitting on the floor in a room full of electronic devices whose black cords looked like squid’s ink spaghetti. It was one of those moments that remind me that I knew a time when cell phones did not exist. Then the diplomat and his little team locked up the building and the cars took them across the desert into the night, toward the Jordanian border. We watched them leave. The novices, of which I was one, suddenly felt all alone, as if abandoned to the jaws of the uncertain event. The veterans had knowing looks on their faces. The eyes of some of them began to light up: at last, this adventure was becoming interesting.
One of the veterans had already collected a considerable supply of water and canned food. He told me, with a smile simultaneously calm, excited, and provocative: “If there’s gas, I’ll go to a cellar in the hotel and wait there. A month, if I have to. I’m ready for anything.” He was expecting disaster, pressure, something new. He had been living on it ever since the age when Rimbaud left Charleroi. He came from a tribe in which journalism was the narrative of an experience lived by the person who was recounting it. Blond, short, and stocky, he resembled Tintin. He died three years later, at the age of thirty-five, of an illness he caught during an assignment in Asia. When I read this in a newspaper, I was overwhelmed. He was so young and had already taken so many risks that I thought he would survive everything, because he already seemed so old, so lucid. I must have believed that an intelligent and informed insouciance would make him eternal, but I no longer remember what I thought. I had a tendency to admire those who succeeded in what I was incapable of undertaking. Him, dead? So, it was possible to die on a reporting assignment? To fall off the flying carpet on which we soared over the world? Yes, it was possible. I was naïve, optimistic, afraid, almost innocent. I think that at that time almost all of us were. The world that was ending still allowed us to remain young as long as possible.
In Baghdad, ISIS’s future killers were still secular killers working for Saddam, a rather corpulent figure whose badly painted portraits were displayed everywhere. In the Arab world, they were distributed in the form of pins, just as brooches were made in the form of Scuds—the Scuds with which Iraq was trying to hit Israel. The Gulf War was a tasteless, deadly boring story, and the only reading material I had taken to Baghdad was The Thousand and One Nights. The great danger filled the marbled void of the hotel from which we sent reports by fax.
Ben Bella smiled, like Tintin soon to be dead, when journalists asked him if he was going to leave before the American bombardment. He said: “Don’t you think I’ve seen worse in the cellars of Algiers?” He knew the value of his public figure, no matter how out of date he might be. Die in Baghdad? Not everyone has an opportunity to die of stomach cancer on Saint Helena, or the genius to live what preceded. Perhaps Ben Bella also felt that if the Iraqi people was paying the price for several decades of chaos, the international witnesses of the origin of this chaos were in no danger. He had experience, points of comparison. He was tall, powerful, rather heavy, which surprised me: I had imagined, I don’t know why, that the FLN’s former combatants were all small, skinny, and nervous, as if they were still living in the scrubland of some wilayah or operating clandestinely in the shantytown of Nanterre. Among so many charlatans, politicians gone astray, and international scoundrels, he alone impressed me; or more exactly, he alone made me feel that we were witnessing the end of a history—that of decolonization—and the beginning of something disturbing. We were experiencing it without knowing it: the air of history was still quite lighthearted, the reporters seemed carefree. It is often said that the current disaster began with the Iranian Revolution. In my case, everything began in Baghdad. Everything that was going to lead to, among other things, the events of January 7. I was there, but I left too early. On January 7 I was there, too, but I got up to leave too late.
When you’re a reporter, you have to stay where the event is taking place, and do so, if possible, on the side of those who are weak and unknown, ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary situation, in order to give them a name and as much life as possible at a time when a power, no matter which one, is seeking to take it away from them. Thus I should have remained with the Iraqis, even if their leader was a criminal, even if that luxurious hotel from which it was difficult to escape was a site of propaganda and theatrics, even if investigation had become almost impossible in that country. I should have done that because the great powers were against them and because it was necessary just to testify, as much as possible, to the effects of the bombardment. It’s as simple as that, and I didn’t do it. In the end, those who stayed were expelled the day after the bombardment. They saw almost nothing. But we couldn’t have guessed that. Why did I leave? Because I was scared? Everyone, or almost, was scared, and yet a few of them stayed. Because I couldn’t control my fear? That’s possible: it’s not even certain. In Amman, a few days later, a friend who had taken the last plane with me, said to me: “You came back because of the carpet.” He wasn’t wrong, that’s all one can say. I continue to think that on that day, by taking the plane for Amman with the last European journalists—the Americans had left long before, obeying the orders of their superiors, who were themselves obeying their government’s commands—I gave up the career as a reporter that seemed to await me. A possible life died, a life that probably consisted of backpacks and solitude, I don’t know, in any case another life, a life that this carpet symbolized.
The evening of the bombardment, I was supposed to go to dinner at the home of a Palestinian diplomat to whom I had been introduced by an old Iraqi painter I’d met in this city a few years before. I hadn’t canceled this dinner, because that morning I still believed I would go there. Had I remained, I would have seen from his residence the night sky lit up by the bombardment. We might have ended up in his cellar, drinking wine, champagne; he, too, had seen it all before. That would have created bonds between us. He would have become a friend. He would have introduced me to his friends, some of whom would have become my friends. I might have been, on January 7, 2015, a semi-expert on this part of the world, and not a culture critic for Libération and a columnist for Charlie Hebdo. And then, from Baghdad, what reports I would have written! Instead of which I had fled and, at the same time, without yet suspecting it, more or less said farewell to the Arab world in which I was beginning to feel at ease, and which, twenty-four years later, in an unforeseeable form and in the heart of Paris, was going to catch up with me. This carpet had spent all those years under my nose, under my feet. It constantly reminded me of Iraq, of that Palestinian diplomat who would still be waiting for me to arrive for dinner, and of the shame and regrets that had followed, the regrets and then the forgetting—a certain kind of forgetting. It had fallen apart little by little, like my memory, like all that was the most bitter and the most anodyne in it.
I looked at the carpet, as I did every morning, thinking, as I did every morning, that it was time to throw it away, and knowing that I wouldn’t do it, because it could still carry me aloft, without my knowing exactly how or why. Then I stretched out on it to do my exercises, as I did every morning, with the radio on. The guest on France Inter that day was—think of that!—Michel Houellebecq. I remembered that only after doing some research, a year later, to find out whom I might have been listening to that morning. I’d forgotten all about it. Since then, I have listened to the interview again. So, the killers were getting ready while he was talking in a feigned sleepy voice about the republic and Islam. They were checking their weapons while he was murmuring his provocations in a minor mode. In two hours, his fiction would be overtaken by an outgrowth of the phenomenon it had imagined. We never control the development of the illnesses we diagnose, provoke, or maintain. The world in which Houellebecq lived had even more imagination than the one he was describing.
I stretched my muscles as he described Soumission as a “satire,” a “political fiction, not necessarily very credible.” I did my push-ups while he said that the reelection of François Hollande in 2017 would be “a case of sleight of hand that would produce a disturbance, a strange situation in the country.” I did a headstand as he was saying that democracy would be ridiculed by that election, and I must have started working on my abs when he said that the Islam described in Soumission appeared to him, all things considered, to be rather moderate. “It seems to me that there are much worse things,” he said, laughing imperceptibly, as I was breathing and contracting my muscles. Within two hours, he would be right.
I must not have been completely distracted as I listened to the interview. I am now going to describe it as I might have in the column for the next issue of Charlie, the one for January 14, if the attack hadn’t rendered null and void what he said that morning. The anchorman, Patrick Cohen, who has too many listeners not to merge his role, his personality, and his function, seems surprised, almost scandalized by the oil the writer is throwing on the fire. He says to him: “I remind you that in France, Muslims are five percent of the electorate. Five percent!” Houellebecq: “Yes. So what? I’m sorry, but for my part I find it very disturbing when people cannot be represented.” As is often the case, he is not wrong: Muslims are poorly represented in France, and, as always, he is perverse: he makes this group a threat, even as he claims to defend its right to representation. Cohen reacts: “You’re essentializing Muslims.” “What do you mean by ‘essentializing’?” replies the writer, who always implacably spots what Gérard Genette calls the “medialect”: all the big words that my profession goes on repeating without thinking and that are merely the signs of an automatic morality. Cohen flounders a bit and, since he likes to have the last word, attacks: “Basically, what you recount, what you imagine, in this novel, is the death of the republic. Is that what you want, Michel Houellebecq?”
At that point, the interview slipped into the usual misunderstanding—a misunderstanding that Houellebecq’s virtuoso ambiguity nourishes. That was probably the point when I chose to do my knee bends with the help of a broomstick. Cohen was no longer questioning his guest as a novelist but as an ideologue or politician: anything to avoid talking about the text. Houellebecq understood that long ago, maybe he has always known it, and if he crosses over and over again the borderline between literature and politics, like a glorious smuggler, he does so primarily to increase the value of his trade. I’m a bird, see my wings, I’m a mouse, long live rats! “I don’t know what I want,” he told Cohen, adding, with his sly irony: “I can adapt to various systems . . . ” In the video, you see him scratch his ear like an old dog. He seems to be brushing off the lice with which his interlocutor is infesting him. Cohen: “You don’t have a point of view?” Houellebecq: “No, not really.” The journalist persists: “Reading you, one can’t help thinking that such a novel can’t be written without having a point of view.” Houellebecq replies as a novelist: “Well, I disagree; to write such a novel one must precisely not have a point of view. There are plenty of characters who have points of view in this novel. It’s best not to have a point of view in order to let them speak in turn.”
Then they turn to the relation between France and its Muslims, and the writer says: “No, on the whole, after a close reading of the Quran, I’m sure negotiation is possible. The problem is that there’s always room for interpretation. By taking a surah and exploiting it fully, and by eliminating five other surahs, one can end up with a jihadist. It takes a major dose of dishonesty to read the Quran and arrive at that conclusion, but it’s possible.” What were the killers doing at that moment? Were they reading a surah that they were going to exploit fully in two and a half hours? I think I finished my exercises at the moment that Houellebecq was saying that the republic was not one of his absolutes. I turned off the radio and went to take a shower.
Next, I reflected on Twelfth Night. When I left, I still didn’t know whether I was would go directly to write my article at Libération or first attend Charlie’s editorial meeting. The offices of the first paper were on the way to those of the second. Since it was the first meeting of the year, I would be glad to meet everyone again, and especially Wolinski, whom I always enjoyed seeing. But Shakespeare was waiting for me . . . I hadn’t made up my mind.
I wrote Gabriela that Princeton had confirmed my position and that I had bought a plane ticket. I wrote to an editor that I would like to meet the writer Akhil Sharma in New York. He was publishing a novel, Family Life, whose opening pages had pleased me, but which I never finished reading.
Later, between operating rooms and nurses, between morphine and insomnia, I often imagined the story that derived from this interview. I met the writer in his neighborhood in Brooklyn or in Queens, depending on my dream. We drank tea and talked about India, where he was born and where I had not been for a long time. We discussed immigration and literature as ideal female companions, even if they were generally separate. We went to walk in the New York neighborhood of his childhood. Later, I returned there to dine with Gabriela, who was crazy about Indian food. I examined in detail the dishes, the odors, the places, the servers, our discussions. Sometimes I ended up in India with Gabriela, in Bombay or Madras rather than in Delhi. When it was in Madras, we embraced in the little aquarium described by Henri Michaux, which I had visited for that reason. Preferably, we kissed in front of one of those exotic fish called tetraodons, which, according to Michaux, looked “so filled up, swollen, shapeless, ready to burst.” You resemble them, she told me, since I was disfigured. And we laughed. Then we imagined the life of each animal, not a fable, but its history: how it had landed there, what it felt, how the sensations of the trap, the light, eyes behind the glass, and death, floated in it. I gave up these reveries a little too late not to feel saddened and exhausted by their faintness, their impossibility, and the nervous pain they provoked.
The mysterious Akhil Sharma was not the only person who occupied bits of life I had not had. I regularly imagined the various encounters I would have had in Cuba had I escaped the attack. A week earlier, my former mother-in-law had returned to Havana, where she had lived before, and she had urged me to accompany her. I was tempted, but the prospect of meeting Gabriela in New York made me refuse: I expected to go to Cuba on assignment for Libération the following month. I have never returned there since. The editor sent me Akhil Sharma’s address and phone number three-quarters of an hour after the attack. She did not yet know that it had taken place. I read her e-mail message about ten days later. Like so many other things, it came from another world. I answered it only in February.
I wrote another message, about Houellebecq, to Claire, my friend and department head. Annoyance, which is never very far away in my case, rose up again. I told her that on France 2 and France Inter he seemed to me “a kind of guru-ized figure who says nothing, and other people’s chatter and judgments sink into that void—as if he were a sort of prophet. It’s very astonishing, this madness of the system people. That leaves room, Saturday, for an interview that I hope will be more reasonable and precise.”
I’m not proud of this e-mail message and a few others of the same kind written in its wake, any more than I am of the frivolity from which they arose and which they fed. I would have liked to “finish” my earlier life with sentences that were a little calmer, more amusing, and more interesting, even if not at all definitive. I don’t believe I would have liked to write “as if it were the last sentence of my life.” In any case, when what follows happens by accident, you don’t have time to prepare your clothes, your gestures, and your last words. I wrote those harmless lines, which are rather scornful and not without self-satisfaction, as if life were going to continue. That is why I feel a certain compassion for the person who sent them: they are the last words of an ordinary, thoughtless journalist. Words written before the attack that was being prepared as he was writing them. The last ones, if I except an e-mail informing a colleague that I was thinking about writing that day on a book about jazz entitled Blue Note, which I had just received. This book, as we will see, probably saved my life, and I am writing this, as I write every day, a few meters away from it. It is my immobile talisman; it’s a little too heavy to carry with me. As for my annotated copy of Soumission, it was left lying around at Libération, where it disappeared.
An e-mail from Gabriela arrived just as I was about to shut down my computer. She replied with a single word:
Yahoo!
It was 4 A.M. in New York, she was not asleep, and just as I was slipping on my pea coat and my cap to go out, she called me on FaceTime. Her sleepy, smiling face appeared in the dark of her New York apartment. I could make it out, faintly illuminated by the bluish glow of her cell phone. I felt, as I often did, a slight pain arising from the frustration of not being able to pass through the screen to feel her presence, her warmth, her breath, her smell. I would have liked to start my night again over there. We said “te quiero” to each other, we repeated that we would soon be together, and then I murmured that I was running late and that I’d call her after lunch. She kissed me on the screen, which must have misted over on her side. I hung up and went out. I got on my bike and it was then, on the boulevards, near the Monoprix, where I stopped to buy a yogurt drink, that I chose to go first to Charlie.
When I got there, the meeting had already begun. I wanted to get a copy of the day’s paper, but there were none left, and again I felt annoyed. Grumbling, I went into the room where everyone was sitting. A seat was waiting for me at the back, between Bernard Maris and Honoré. I remember having said, more or less: “Really, it’s incredible that there aren’t enough copies of the paper for each of us on the day it’s published and when we’re supposed to talk about it.” Charb had an ironic and benevolent smile that meant: “Well, so Lançon is doing his irritable number!” Honoré, with his habitual kindness, took one of his two copies out of his bag and gave it to me. We were a band of pals who were more or less close and who worked for a little paper that was now broke, almost dead. We knew it, but we were free. We were there to have fun, to yell at each other, to refuse to take an appalling world seriously. I was ashamed of my reaction and looked at the front page.
It had been drawn by Luz, who was late that morning. It depicted Houellebecq as a wan, crazy demi-tramp holding a cigarette; he had a drunkard’s nose and wore a starred cap on his head that suggested he’d imbibed too much bad wine the night before. Above the image, these words: “The predictions of Houellebecq the magician.” And below it, the predictions: “In 2015, I’m going to lose my teeth . . . in 2022, I’m observing Ramadan!” Luz had foreseen everything, truly, except the attack. A few lines and two balloons summed up, better than I could have, my irritation at the looming circus: that is the aggressively elliptical virtue of caricature. At the bottom of the page, there was an ad for a “special number” on the life of baby Jesus. While I was examining the front page in greater detail, the discussion that my entrance had interrupted resumed. I looked up and listened. They were talking about Houellebecq.